Amnesty criticises Iraq record on executions
Iraq has joined the ranks of the world's leading executioners, human rights group Amnesty International said today.
Iraqi authorities executed at least 65 people - including two women - in 2006, a total surpassed only by China, Iran and Pakistan, the organisation said.
"This represents a profoundly retrograde step," the report said, "one that should not be overlooked simply because far larger numbers of lives have been lost due to ongoing violence."
The death penalty was suspended after the US-led coalition toppled Saddam Hussein in 2003, but was reinstated when authority was handed over to the Iraqi provisional government in August 2004.
Since its reintroduction, more than 270 people have been sentenced to death and at least 100 people have been executed, the report says.
Comparisons to the situation before the fall of Saddam were difficult because the Iraqi regime deliberately obscured the number of people it sentenced to death, said Carsten Jurgensen, an Amnesty researcher on Iraq.
But he said that, in some cases, the laws instituted by the new Iraqi government were even stricter than those from Saddam's time.
He cited laws which stipulated the death penalty for kidnappings and a wide variety of terrorist offences - even in cases in which no one is hurt or killed.
For those accused of capital crimes, Iraq's fledging justice system offered little protection against abuse, Jurgensen said.
"People have been executed after trials that don't meet international standards," he said.
"Obviously there have been prominent examples like Saddam Hussein, but then there have been all the other non-prominent cases, which hardly get mentioned anywhere."
In a country where detainees were often kept days or weeks without being brought before a judge and where defence lawyers often had little or no access to their clients, Amnesty said the use of torture in capital cases was a concern.
Some Iraqis were executed after making confessions on the Iraqi television show Terrorism In The Grip Of Justice, which was taken off the air in 2005, Amnesty said.
Many of those appearing on the show bore signs of torture, the report said.
Two protections often afforded to those convicted of capital crimes were being denied in Iraq, where those sentenced to death by the Supreme Iraqi Criminal Court could neither be pardoned nor have their sentence commuted.
The report said capital punishment had done nothing to deter the violence roiling the country.
"It was entirely predictable that the restoration of the death penalty would ... perpetuate and exacerbate the abuse of human rights and come to be seen, as in the case of Saddam Hussein's execution, as an instrument of vengeance far removed from any notions of justice," the report said.
